Bring up the continuing battle over online piracy among college students, and most campus officials will talk about the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, the two trade groups that have most vocally and aggressively fought peer-to-peer downloading.
But other organizations, too, are deeply concerned about the issue, and one of them, the Business Software Alliance, is stepping out a bit. The alliance — which represents Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft, among other companies — has followed the lead of the RIAA and the MPAA, creating a Web site to preach the antipiracy gospel to college students.
On the site, B4UCopy,a video warns students that they may be fined, expelled from college, or even sent to prison if they get pirating online material. Like the recording industry, the software alliance makes sure to include a testimonial from a student who was arrested. “I’m looking at 18 to 24 months in jail, tens of thousand dollars in fines,” says the student, Daniel Ferris. “I know that, down the line, my career’s destroyed.”
The recording and movie industries have succeeded in getting their own antipiracy material into campus-orientation programs. We’ll see if the Business Software Alliance can do the same. —Brock Read
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